Almanacs Foresee a Super Bowl to Test Fans’ Resolve, and Snow Gear

When the N.F.L. owners met near Dallas three years ago and chose to hold Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey, it was a balmy 90 degrees and dry as a bone. The 80,000 fans who attend the game in February may be happy if it is half as warm.

This season’s Super Bowl will be the first played outdoors in a cold climate, and if all goes well, cities like Boston, Chicago and Denver may bid to host future games. But in voting to reward the Jets and the Giants for spending $1.6 billion to build MetLife Stadium, the N.F.L. owners sparked a host of prognostications, some of which call for Snowmaggedon on game day.

Almanacs, in particular, outhouse companions to many a farmer long ago, have been boldly predicting a grim Super Bowl. Using mathematical and astronomical formulas that take into account sunspots, tides, the position of the planets and other factors, Caleb Weatherbee, the pseudonym of the forecaster at the Farmers’ Almanac, is “red-flagging” early February and expects “copious wind, rain, and snow” around the time of the game.

“They should have checked with us before they scheduled the game in New Jersey,” said Sandi Duncan, the managing editor of the almanac. “If I was paying that much for a ticket, I might not want to sit in the snow.”

Not to be outdone, the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is about a quarter-century older than the Farmers’ Almanac, said a nor’easter could hit the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area at the beginning of February and, depending on the storm’s track, dump snow or rain on the stadium.

“We’re doing something that’s damn near impossible and doing it for a long time,” said Tim Clark, a contributing editor. Unfortunately, he said, “we haven’t directly determined the correlation between the solar cycles and the Cover 2 defense.”

Both almanacs said their weather outlooks were accurate about 80 percent of the time, so fans at the game could certainly end up dry, if not chilled. Since 2003, the temperature at Newark Liberty International Airport at kickoff on Super Bowl night has been 23 to 47 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was precipitation on only three of those days.

Most mainstream meteorologists who rely on satellites and other high-tech wizardry sniff at these outlooks and contend that it is nearly impossible to predict with any precision what the weather will be on a specific date months in advance. Historical averages are useful, they say, but it is a fool’s errand to forecast anything beyond about two weeks.

“It’s silly to say we can predict a snowstorm three months in advance,” said Jack Boston, a long-range meteorologist at AccuWeather.com. “One out of 10 times, you’ll get lucky.”

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CreditIllustration by Sam Manchester/The New York Times

Frank Supovitz, the N.F.L. senior vice president for events, is hedging his bets. The owners knew what they bargained for when they picked MetLife Stadium to host the game, he said. The New York-New Jersey area is the country’s largest media market and an appealing destination for executives and fans who, he said, will be able to ride toboggans down Broadway.

“Embrace the cold,” said Supovitz, who suggested that the almanacs predicting snowstorms were publicity hounds. “I hope it snows on game day a little bit so it’s captured on TV against the stadium lights.”

Just in case, the N.F.L. will give all fans at the game “Warm Welcome” kits that include lip balm, foil blankets, hand warmers and earmuffs stuffed into a seat cushion. It is unclear whether Bruno Mars, the halftime act who hails from Hawaii, will perform with gloves and earmuffs. Perhaps he was picked in the hope he would bring warm weather with him.

Despite the hand-wringing about this Super Bowl — which coincidentally will be played on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day — the weather in other cities has been anything but predictable. The Super Bowl in Atlanta in 2000 was played indoors, but ice storms created havoc for travelers and revelers. In Texas in 2011, snow slid off the roof of the stadium and hit a few people. Fans at the Super Bowl in South Florida in 2007 dealt with strong wind and heavy rain.

Fretting about the Super Bowl aside, fans endure plenty of cold and wet weather during the playoffs, especially in places like Chicago, Denver and Seattle. In fact, some of the most memorable playoff games were played in bad weather, including the so-called Ice Bowl between the host Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys in 1967 and the Snow Bowl in 2002 between the Oakland Raiders and the host New England Patriots.

Other than the obvious inconvenience for fans, inclement weather only marginally affects the game. In a study commissioned by MetLife, Stats L.L.C. determined that since 1991 there was only a 5-percentage point difference in quarterback ratings between games played in temperatures above 70 degrees and those below 40 degrees. The gaps in points scored and turnovers a game were also fairly narrow. Only field-goal percentages for attempts of 40 yards or longer were noticeably different.

“It’s liable to be below freezing and the colder you get, the more difference there’s likely to be for numbers like this,” said Don Zminda, the vice president for research at Stats, referring to game statistics.

Some meteorologists, like Irv Gikofsky, who is known as Mr. G to television viewers in the New York area, said that not enough attention was being paid to the days before and after the Super Bowl, when tens of thousands of people will be traveling to and from the metropolitan area.

Though reluctant to provide a specific forecast for game day, Gikofsky said the normal low temperatures for the first four days of February were about 25 degrees, cold enough for snow.

“It could be a four-day drama,” he said. “Believe it or not, this story could be bigger than the game itself.”